Trust Sofia Coppola to Spark a Trend
Trust Sofia Coppola to spark a trend. Trust Andy Warhol to perfectly encapsulate a moment, too.
It was Coppola’s portrait of fashion designer Marc Jacobs, which premiered at the 2025 Venice International Film Festival, that inspired Sydney Film Festival’s tribute to the garment trade.
Marc by Sofia, Coppola’s first-ever non-fiction title, now sits at the heart of the festival’s Sartorial: Film on Fashion program.
Warhol popping up in Frederick Wiseman’s recently restored Model, a dive into New York modelling agency Zoli, aptly mirrors where Jessica Moraza, SFF’s Senior Programmer, has taken the strand from there.
Mid-movie, the acclaimed artist chats with two male models, who muse about the interplay between reality and illusion that’s fundamental to the fashion industry. In the process, Model captures a famous figure from beyond the sartorial realm observing and probing what can seem like an insular world – and, crucially, taking seriously a field that is often dismissed as frivolous.
Film on Fashion at SFF – Quick Links
- Fashion through an auteur lens
- Dressed for success
- Mixing and matching
- Vintage finds
- On trend
Fashion through an Auteur Lens
It’s no wonder that Moraza picks Warhol’s ‘very surprising and disarming’ scene in Model as her favourite in the Sartorial: Film on Fashion program.
Stitching together movies by Coppola, iconic documentarian Wiseman, and fellow auteurs Agnès Varda, Wim Wenders, Robert Altman and Jia Zhangke, her retrospective-heavy ode to cinema’s exploration of fashion favours the same approach.
‘As soon as I saw Marc by Sofia in the Venice line-up, it just made me think of instances where great directors that we know and love have taken an interest in fashion – and not typical fashion documentaries like The September Issue or The First Monday in May,’ Moraza tells.
Such quintessential looks at all things sartorial have graced SFF’s screens over its past 72 years, including, yes, The September Issue, plus the likes of Valentino: The Last Emperor, Dior and I, McQueen, Halston, Iris, Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf’s and Twiggy, with the festival’s audiences flocking along.
Dressed for Success
Befitting a city that hosts Australian Fashion Week, Sydney viewers are known for revelling in fashion-focused fare, as Moraza discovered in previous roles as Program & Content Manager and then Head of Programming at Golden Age Cinema & Bar.
‘I always had really great luck with fashion documentaries,’ she says. ‘There’s a strong audience here for films about fashion and design and architecture.’
But as she prepared for this year’s SFF, the filmmakers were just as important as the shared subject matter. ‘I wanted to shine a light on some auteur-centric fashion films that perhaps people hadn’t seen,’ Moraza says.
With the beloved director of The Virgin Suicides, Lost in Translation, The Bling Ring and Priscilla turning her attention to a lifelong friend, Marc by Sofia was always destined to be among the festival’s drawcards, whether or not SFF also honoured fashion-related cinema.
Predictably, it was ‘the first to fly out the door,’ Moraza says of ticket sales for the A24 documentary’s Australian premiere – so much so that the festival has increased its run from two to three sessions.
While Moraza was confident that Sydney would embrace the full Sartorial: Film on Fashion program, the scale of the reaction has come as a surprise. ‘We were thinking it would be popular, but we didn’t expect the response that it has had,’ she says.
‘Retrospectives at SFF are always a little bit of a challenge. This isn’t a traditional retrospective, because it has two new films in the series – but because they’re competing with the likes of the top films from Cannes, it can sometimes be a challenge to get our audience to make time for the older films in the program during the 10 days of SFF.’
Sartorial: Film on Fashion’s dual approach – championing fashion alongside filmmaker perspectives on it – is astute, then. ‘People are always drawn to directors that they already know,’ Moraza notes, while recognising her own personal obsession with, and interest in, auteur-driven cinema.
Wenders’ Notebook on Cities and Clothes, which shines the spotlight on Japanese designer Yohji Yamamoto, has already sold out, for instance.
‘All the rest of them are at least half full,’ says Moraza. That includes Varda’s playful Jane Birkin portrait Jane B. par Agnes V., plus Useless, in which Chinese director Zhangke examines his homeland’s garment industry via a designer, a tailor and factory workers.
Mixing and Matching
As those in fashion have always known, there’s an art to standing out as a newcomer. ‘It can be a little bit more difficult to get audiences to take a chance on directors that they perhaps haven’t heard of,’ Moraza observes.
At this year’s SFF, however, that isn’t proving an issue for French Girls, the first feature by Sydney-based Korean-Australian filmmaker Hyun Lee.
‘It has just completely taken off – and we’ve now added a fourth session. It’s just incredible for a debut feature, Australian feature, world premiere. The film only cost $28,000 to make. It’s just amazing to see how keen people are to see it.’
Having an Australian film, and a brand-new one at that, in the fashion cohort ‘was actually really a lovely surprise,’ Moraza says.
‘I’d already programmed the Sartorial strand. It was pretty much 90% locked in a few weeks out from going on sale. And then I saw French Girls, and it has this amazing parallel with Robert Altman’s Prêt-à-Porter, I thought, where it’s a fictional film but there’s a lot of real-life characters from the Sydney fashion scene within it.
‘I thought it made this really interesting companion piece with Prêt-à-Porter, as well as Model in the series, the Frederick Wiseman, because French Girls follows an aspiring model who is a bit in over her head with the fashion world,’ Moraza continues.
‘So I had to pitch it to Hyun Lee and Georgia Noe, the director and producer of French Girls, to be a part of this rather than to be a part of our regular announcement. And they were totally on board and very encouraging.’
Vintage Finds
Cultivating a sense of discovery by connecting audiences to the work of emerging talents like Lee is a guiding principle for Moraza as a curator. So is rediscovery, giving viewers the chance to see something that they might’ve missed or even dismissed.
‘I don’t want to alienate the audience and totally go so far out that no-one is interested in seeing a film that I program, but definitely finding those lesser-known films, or perhaps films that are deserving of more attention that I think have the potential to really resonate with Sydney audiences, is one of the things I think about most when it comes to programming,’ says Moraza.
The star-studded, Paris Fashion Week-set Prêt-à-Porter from 1994 falls into the vintage-finds category. Despite the festival hosting an Altman retrospective back in 2014, this is the movie’s SFF debut.
Moraza herself only watched it for the first time in 2025, ‘I think because it had a bit of a maligned reputation and had never really been recommended to me as one of Robert Altman’s great films,’ she says. ‘But I saw it and was just really taken by it.’
‘I’m particularly enthusiastic about comedy and celebrating classic comedy,’ she adds. ‘It does feel like a bit of an opportunity to reclaim history and launch a defence of these films that are great – or at least I think are great – but have been unfairly maligned in the past. And often they are comedies. Comedies are often poorly reviewed, unfortunately.’
On Trend
The Sartorial: Film on Fashion program explores the love for fashion on-screen across seven movies from the 80s, 90s, 00s and now, ranging over both documentaries and fictional features, playful and more straightforward films, and pictures spanning Sydney, China, Paris, New York and Tokyo.
It is as impeccably timed as it is curated, too, arriving hot on the heels of The Devil Wears Prada 2’s box-office domination – plus the thriller Mother Mary, also starring Anne Hathaway, where fashion is no less critical to the titular fictional pop star’s journey.
Why horror hearts fashion – Mother Mary and killer clothes on screen
‘Definitely people, the audience, have fashion on the brain at the moment,’ says Moraza, who sees her job as trying to ‘program to the zeitgeist or what people are talking about, thinking about, at the moment’.
Film and fashion couldn’t better pair better in general. ‘One of the things that struck me the most when putting together this series was the parallel between the work of a film director and the work of a fashion designer,’ says Moraza.
‘They’re both in industries that very much straddle art and commerce, and they both have to maintain this line of trying to protect their artistic integrity as much as they can while making a profit or making money with their artforms.’
That said, Sartorial: Film on Fashion has another task: helping audiences avoid Anne Hathaway’s mistake as Andy Sachs in the original The Devil Wears Prada, as so witheringly countered by Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestly in her cerulean monologue, of denying fashion’s importance and influence.
‘If you look at these films and the directors’ filmographies,’ says Moraza of the retrospective titles in the Sartorial program, ‘none of them are the most celebrated film within that director’s filmography. They’re all sort of hidden gems or discoveries.’
She adds, ‘I think that’s because fashion is not always taken seriously as a subject … for serious cinephiles to engage with.’
Sydney Film Festival 2026 takes place across Sydney from 3 to 14 June.
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